A discussion of the need to complement phenomenology’s emphasis on description and first-person experience, in accounting for the human production of meaning, with hermeneutics’ emphasis on interpretation and third-person experience, partially through accounting for the roles of corrigibility and argumentation in the phenomenological method.

In this article, I deal with the problem of social order from a phenomenological standpoint. In the first place, I summarize Schutz’s position on constitutional analysis and its relevance for the Social Sciences. In the second place, I pose some questions related to the constitution of social realities in Husserl, which have also been acknowledged by Schutz. In the third place, I discuss the significance of the constitutional analysis of the thing in Husserl for a phenomenological approach to social facts in Durkheim’s sense. Finally, I sketch out some features of social order understood as a constituted region.

This paper was mostly motivated by Peru’s intense social and economic problems that exploded in an internal armed conflict of exceeding violence, from 1980 to 2000. The A. uses the experience within her country as an exemplification of more global cultural and ideological antagonisms among countries, regions or hemispheres, and to ask whether an encounter beyond cultural differences and reconciliation beyond ideologically motivated antagonisms is at all possible, and upon which bases. Husserl left descriptions that indicate how “plurality” and difference dwell within the most intimate core of one’s “oneness” and “identity”, offering clues as to how we are able to conceive and build “common worlds”, “common truths” and even “objective truth”. The A. finally confronts these transcendental-phenome nological accounts with some elements of certain Amazonian ethnic groups’ worldview, which may seem totally “incompossible” with the Western view that finally nourishes some of Husserl’s basic notions.

This work aims at articulating Heidegger and Winnicott’s proposal regarding the issue of the concrete patterns of identity. First, we shall make a brief exposure of the multiplicity of subjective roles in each of the authors. Second, we shall propose a narrativist interpretation of the issue of the self in both of the aforementioned authors. This work shall not only limit to state the mainly narrative structure of Heidegger’s Selbst and of Winnicott’s Self, but it shall also aim at determining a concrete narrative pattern for each of these roles.

This article develops a phenomenological contribution to the notion of biology in psychopathology and psychiatry. Grounded in the principles of transformation, heterogeneity, proportionality and particularity, a paradigm of phenomenological orientation allocates to biology a role different from that assumed by mainstream psychiatry. First, no clear definition of what is biological may be established a priori as of general application. Second, the research agenda in biological psychiatry necessarily intersects with investigation of the particularities of each individual clinical case. Finally, the continuity of the biological agenda needs to resume the construction and investigation of psychopathological categories that cohere with the reality of the mental universe.

Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Husserl’s reference to the lived body as a “remarkably incompletely constituted thing” transforms the sense of the phrase. My aim is to recover Husserl’s original sense by turning not only to his writings, but to the relevant experiential evidence. I show that any attempt to account for the constitution of the body as a thing necessarily presupposes a body that is constituting rather than constituted, then suggest how “constitution” can be understood methodologically rather than metaphysically, concluding with some reflections on how descriptions produced through Husserlian phenomenological practice both sustain and outrun specific positions in phenomenological philosophy.

The paper evaluates two theses central to Max Scheler’s philosophy of religion: that essential knowledge of God is universal to humankind, and that this knowledge is irreducible to any experience outside itself. We examine the phenomenology of the fivefold process whereby we obtain knowledge of the Absolute. The conclusion is that the first thesis is plausible, and the second less so. However, the defense of the second thesis led Scheler to a fruitful phenomenology of religious experience as seeing the world in the light of God. The paper evaluates this world-view as an alternative to the scientific Weltanschauung.

There are few phenomena more tragic than rape-resultant pregnancy; faced with such pregnancies, rape victims are forced to make incredibly difficult and often heart-rending decisions. Yet both public and academic discourse on rape-pregnancy fails to acknowledge the profoundly tragic nature of these decisions, and also tends to implicitly or explicitly blame victims who opt for abortion or adoption. This paper critiques the use of praise and blame in relation to rape-resultant pregnancies, emphasizing the harmful effects of moral judgments on pregnant rape victims, and calls instead for a new ethical paradigm that acknowledges the deeply tragic nature of this phenomenon.

In this paper, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of anonymity in the Phenomenology of Perception bears a strong resemblance to Luce Irigaray’s discussions of the elemental. I argue that reading these two accounts together helps to counter some of the critiques waged by feminists against the language of anonymity, because anonymity—like the elemental—does not in fact function as a positive substratum that would shore up sameness and prevent the rupture of difference. Instead, anonymity names the way in which the subject is always already disrupted by its encounter with and belonging-to the natural world.